Analyzing the role of employee training tools in the journey towards more sustainable companies '
Sustainable and trainable!?

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Analyzing the role of employee training tools in the journey towards more sustainable companies '
Sustainable and trainable!?

Kaufmann, A.

(2013) Faculty of Geosciences Theses

(Master thesis)

Abstract

Corporate sustainability reporting increasingly reveals the use of employee training measures with explicit sustainability-oriented content. An often communicated objective is achieving the workforce' s active involvement in the company' s sustainability efforts since this is perceived a necessity for successful change processes. Against this background, latest literature suggests that process-based ... read more HRM tools such as trainings could be used to embed sustainability strategies in corporate practices and culture. However, academic accounts remain on a conceptual level and practical evidence is scattered. This thesis thus aims to acquire a more structured, empirical in-depth understanding of the role and importance of sustainability-oriented employee training tools applied as part of corporate efforts to engage employees in the journey towards improved corporate sustainability. To do so, an exploratory single case study of a German multinational company combined with a Grounded Theory-approach to data analysis is applied. Data from secondary documents, semi-structured interviews with company employees and external experts (main stage), and a questionnaire (supplementary stage) are entered into a computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software. A thematic analysis is conducted based on the principles of grounded theory' s constant comparative method. The results reveal a portfolio of sustainability-oriented trainings organized on different company levels and with heterogeneous elements of design and utilization. Along these dimensions, several barriers for sustainability-oriented training implementation arise despite the identified communicated support for a coherent training program. These barriers originate in the fragmented alignment with other corporate sustainability measures, communicational and organizational discrepancies between different company levels, as well as in lacking appreciation by top management and general workforce alike. The supplementary exploration of one of the tools' performance in engaging participants in sustainability-oriented thinking and acting discloses limited potential. The company' s overall approach to sustainability as perceived by employees reveals similar incongruences as the training portfolio for which it depicts the broader context. The categories derived from these data-grounded findings are eventually inductively related within an explanatory model. From this, it can be concluded that although sustainability-oriented employee trainings exist and their formal role is quite elaborate, their actual importance and significance in the broader corporate strategy context is limited due to several factors such as inconsistent organizational alignment and lacking top management support. Based on the findings of this first empirical attempt towards analyzing employee trainings as an example of sustainability-oriented HRM measures, a number of managerial recommendations for future enhanced use of these trainings as well as implications for further research are formulated. show less

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